


this love, doesn't feel like it should

by SoulJelly



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Majin Vegeta, Missing Scene, Possession, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 09:21:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoulJelly/pseuds/SoulJelly
Summary: Between the destruction of the World Martial Arts stadium and Vegeta and Goku's vengeful battle, the prince and Bulma share a moment that isn't quite an 'I love you' or a goodbye, but something in the middle.





	this love, doesn't feel like it should

**Author's Note:**

> An old fill from dragonkink that I always meant to claim and post. It's the only time I ever wrote this pairing and they're a huge ship for me.
> 
> The request was for 'hot possessive!sex, with Bulma being all conflicted because of Vegeta's recent acts of evil. Bonus points for him taunting her that she secretly likes seeing him kill people'.

The world had fallen apart.  
  
A day full of promise now bore the debris of a thousand charred corpses, and plumes of heavy black smoke struggled upwards in twisted spires towards the cloudless sky. Fear lingered long after the humans had fled; one could run their hand over the nearest surface and almost expect to come away with their fingertips coated in it, acrid and filthy.  
  
Vegeta surveyed the aftermath with passive disinterest. This scene was no different to all those he had seen before, wrought like this one by his own hand. Those memories were crisper and clearer now than they had been in years, dredged up by dark magic and given new life by a twisted kind of fury. If he only closed his eyes, he would hear the screams of his long-dead victims, and the echo of cold, high laughter as though the worst ghost of them all were standing beside him.  
  
Instead, Vegeta kept his gaze fixed ahead. Beneath the smell of smoke and death, the wind carried to him something fainter - the salt of tears, he realised, just as the sound of boots dislodged loose rubble and the silence gave way to heavy breathing.  
  
He considered just waiting, or leaving, but anything other than confrontation would be a loss of face on his part. And so, with forced calm, he turned around.

There she stood.  
  
"Vegeta," she said.  
  
In the confusion, Bulma had lost the others. The crowd swept her up, a fear-driven current pushing her in the opposite direction of the way she wanted to go. She had fought through them, waited for the screams and cries to subside as the stadium emptied of live bodies, and now she stood in front of him and realised she had no idea what she really wanted to say.  
  
As Vegeta turned her eyes caught the emblem on his forehead; a sign in jagged cursive that blended seamllessly into his skin, only the slightest of raised welts around its outline suggesting the newness of it, like an Earth tattoo.  
  
Memories of all her past encounters with magic meant that Bulma could guess what it meant. On a level beyond vocal revelations, Bulma sensed a strangeness in his aura, something dark and foreign and powerful. It battled against Vegeta's usual guarded brashness, the air of frustration that so often prickled from him like static.  
  
A surge of relief swept through her, tugging a shaky grin to the corners of her lips. She shook her head.  
  
"You're not yourself," Bulma said, a weak laugh bubbling in her throat. "You had me there for a moment, Vegeta.... but you're not yourself." She took a step towards him, but the warmth in her stomach turned to ice as he fixed her with a look she hadn't seen in years - a look that she had seen on his face when they were both much younger, enemies beneath an alien green sky.  
  
"You're wrong," he replied. "I'm more _myself_ now than ever."  
  
Bulma took the measure of him, straightened up, planted her hands on her hips. "Well, that's funny," she scoffed, "Because you certainly didn't have a huge letter 'M' stamped on your forehead when I woke up next to you this morning."  
  
The reminder of the life he was leaving behind had him growling low, fists clenching. Vegeta noted with satisfaction the nervous bob of Bulma's throat as she swallowed.  
  
"This was the only way to get back."  
  
He could smell the growing fear in her, the uncertainty evident in the tension in her shoulders, the way she balanced on the balls of her feet, unconciously poised to run. Bulma's eyes slid to the right, eyeing a conspicuously undamaged half of a balcony where she had once stood.  
  
She turned back to him then, with narrowed eyes.  
  
"You almost hit us."  
  
The grin which wound onto his face made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.  
  
"My hand slipped."

"What happened to you?" she pressed. "What really happened?"  
  
"I'm not here to give you explanations." Vegeta shifted his position a little. The raw energy emanating from him sent a chipped stone slab beneath him crumbling into dust. "I'm going to fight Kakarotto. That is my only concern."  
  
She couldn't help rolling her eyes. "That figures." She waited for him to respond. Her sarcasm would at least have gotten a smirk from him, or a sarcastic response in kind, but instead he just stared back at her, saying nothing. Her fists clenched at her sides, fear cast aside suddenly in place of anger. "You made a committment to me, and our son," she continued. He opened his mouth, then, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand. "Cut the crap, Vegeta. You could have left, after Cell, but you didn't. I've shared a bed, a home, a _life_ with you for the last eight years and, damn it, I deserve an explanation!"  
  
She threw her words out into the empty space between them but in the face of his unresponsiveness, they fell flat. Vegeta knew they were only meant to invoke an emotional response, and he felt nothing for her now, so why bother? On the other side of the stadium, out of sight, Goku and Gohan and the Kai were using the reprieve to discuss tactics. The fact that they had left him here, could sense the proximity of his _ki_ to Bulma's and held no apparent fear for her safety, angered him. Kakarotto, no doubt, did not believe the depths to which Vegeta had changed.  
  
He thought about killing her then, just to prove the point, but the gleeful, scratchy voice of the wizard in his head said _Yes, why not, Vegeta?_ and on principle he stayed his hand.  
  
Bulma meanwhile, resigned to Vegeta's silence, sighed. "Silent treatment, huh?" And then she laughed, ran a hand over her tear-stained face. "Look at us. You just murdered thousands of people and here I am, treating it like another domestic. I'm just as insane as you are."  
  
That expression returned then, to the Prince's face, something of the old Vegeta still in. His mouth twisted into a disdainful sneer.  
  
"Is that what it's about? The killing?"  
  
He took a step towards Bulma, and another. Bravely, she stood her ground, until the force of his aura drove her to take one backward step, then another, until finally she flinched as her jutting shoulder blades made the rough edge of the damaged stadium wall, and the slanted roof of an alcove cast them both half in shadow.  
  
"Don't tell me," Vegeta continued, tone mocking and dangerous as his bared teeth against her throat. He tore the scarf from her neck and tossed it to the ground, sunk his teeth into newly exposed skin, and in return her sharply manicured nails scraped ineffectual trails across his arms and back. "Don't tell me that you've ever truly felt safe, knowing what I can do."  
  
Bulma blinked, mouth parted slightly as she struggled for words. She wriggled away from him, unsuccessful as his arms, now braced on the walls either side of her, caged her in. The heat from his body was stifling.  
  
"Don't try to twist this," she warned him, then gasped as his mouth met her neck again, possessive and demanding.  
  
Even as she said it, she thought about all the nights they had spent together, how she had basked quietly in the perverse thrill of being held in the arms of a killer. How her relationship had strained her friendships; how she had become so caught up in Vegeta that three years passed by quick enough to leave her out of breath. How she had stood on that grassy clifftop the day the world was prophesised to end with his man's child in her arms and was suddenly, startlingly aware that she was no longer the woman she had been - she had traded out adventures chasing dragon balls and bandits for danger of a different, deeper kind, just to prove that she could still roll with the best of them.  
  
"You like it, don't you?" She felt his grin, heard the taunt in his voice. "You liked your little brush with death, earlier. And you're enjoying this, right now."  
  
"Fuck you," she gasped, and it was as much an invitation as an insult.

Because this was wrong - _this is wrong, Bulma_ , she told herself, repeated it like a mantra even as her hands ran across the tautness of his flesh, even as she slid her underwear down her thighs and watched him slip out of his own clothes.  
  
If she couldn't get an explanation from him, she would at least take this moment. After everything she had sacrificed for Vegeta, there was no way she was going to be tossed aside, just like that.  
  
Her hands slid to his hair as she kissed him, breathing in smoke and sweat and musk, pouring herself into him. Bulma gave herself over to Vegeta's hands, felt a delicious sliding of hands on skin as he took of his gloves and touched her beneath her dress. His hands were greedy as they roamed the familiar planes of her body - breasts, stomach, and then back again to her eagerly spread thighs.  
  
She planted her hands on his chest, pushed him back slightly as she caught her breath. Taking one hand, she cupped his cheek, forced him to face her. Ignored the ugliness marring his forehead and focused instead on his eyes, black, empty and unforgiving as the vacuous space he had lived in all his life.

Terrifying as they were beautiful, just like the rest of him.  
  
"This is wrong," she breathed. "This is all wrong."  
  
His smirk was more akin to the one she knew best; challenging, almost friendly in a strange sort of way. There was amusement in his voice as he answered her; "Yet, you do it anyway. Lack of self-restraint is such a weak, _human_ trait."  
  
This was so much like an argument they'd had years ago that she laughed, low and hoarse. Inwardly, Vegeta was surprised that he had been allowed this moment, to act as normal as before.  
  
He flung the thought aside, angrily, replacing it with actions - one hand roughly groping her breasts, the other slipping fingers inside her and moving to the rhythm of her gratified moans. Vegeta felt a surge of... something towards her, something that he threatened to lose beneath the storms of twisted rage and Babadi's gleeful malice before he could fully decipher it. He didn't love her any more - the curse had done away with that - but he wanted her, to stake his claim with an urge primal and Saiyajin like he hadn't felt in some time. To prove to Babadi and Kakarotto and himself that he answered to no one, that the world, their battle, would be forced to wait for him whilst he sated his desire for this infuriatingly addictive woman.  
  
He pushed into her with one forceful, fluid movement. It was so intense as to be almost painful, and when Bulma opened her eyes she found Vegeta's tightly closed still, his jaw set, teeth gritted in concentration. He could kill her now, with one small lapse of control, and the thought made her shiver.  
  
The intensity of him - the heat of his aura, the strength pulsing through every fibre of his being - was enough to make her come in a few short thrusts, the ebbing swell of the climax rippling through her body as he pushed into her, controlled yet relentless, again and again; an exquisite equilibrium of pain and pleasure, fire and fury. She let him fill her, clenched herself possessively around him, and when at last he too was sated, he withdrew with deliberate slowness and left her feeling empty.

"You know," Bulma said, as she tugged down her dress and readjusted her underwear, "I still have no idea what's going on."  
  
"I'm going to fight Kakarotto."  
  
"And it took all of this-" she gestured to the chaos around them - "to do that, huh? Jerk."  
  
Vegeta paused for a beat, adjusting his own clothes, deciding whether to indulge her. Then;  
  
"Bitch."

Bulma sneered. She fell easily into the game, made some asinine retort. This time Vegeta just looked through her as though he hadn't even heard.  
  
He had gone quiet again.  
  
Vegeta watched her dust herself down without really seeing her. Babadi's call rang through him, bouncing off the inside of his skull, tearing through his innards and weaving around muscles that ached to answer it.  
  
 _Go and fight Goku,_ the abhorred voice urged him, _I've let you have your way - the least you can do is actually get it done!_  
  
His body twitched, an involuntary spasm as it sought to turn, and leave, and a wave of poisonous pleasure washed through him - the curse's reward for obeying, endlessly reinforced until compliance itself became a drug.  
  
With gritted teeth, Vegeta resisted.  
  
 _You're not letting me do anything,_ he replied, although the words, as soon as he thought them, faded, lost to the maelstrom of conflict in a mind no longer his own. Still... Vegeta had done what he had meant to do and there was an itch to fight Kakarotto that was very real, that came from what was left of himself. If he stayed here any longer, the pain of disobedience would escalate, leave him writhing on the floor as he fought for control of his own body. Leaving Bulma with that memory of him would be a disgrace.  
  
All this, Bulma could only guess at, as she watched his body strain and twitch beneath his clothes and saw the deepening of his scowl as he played out some internal struggle.  
  
Finally, with a great effort, the fingertips of Vegeta's right hand - once again gloved - brushed the skin of her upper arm in a gesture as fleeting as the wind.  
  
Then he drew back, with a barely perceptible nod, and a second later he vanished, blazing a golden trail through the azure sky.  
  
Whatever else had changed about Vegeta, Bulma mused as she reached for her scarf (it had snagged on a twisted piece of metal pokng out of the ground, and she wrapped it around her neck with deliberate slowness), his distaste for romantic afterglows and sentimental goodbyes remained the same. There was something very _final_ about this leaving, however. Something told her to hold onto this memory; it was twisted, conflicted, but important too in a way she couldn't articulate even to herself.  
  
Her face remained turned towards the sky for some time afterwards, though Vegeta was long gone.


End file.
